"A sentence heard by one is worth a house; a sentence heard by none is worth nothing, and nobody can prove it was ever said." – saying of the Morphological Markets
FIELD REPORT – Bureau of Impossible Geography SURVEYOR: Ottoline Marsh REPORT 6 OF 14 SUBJECT: The economy of Glossolaria The Bureau asked me to establish what the city lives on. It lives on sentences. Every evening at dusk two thousand blooms each say one sentence that has never been said before, and every sentence is written down by its listener, and every written sentence belongs, under an article of the Charter that the Concordance wrote and the Keepers have never managed to repeal, to the person who heard it. It may be sold. The Morphological Markets, an iron-and-glass hall like the old Halles of Paris, between the Gardens and the sea, exist to sell them. A sentence is sold pressed between two plates of glass, sealed with wax, stamped with the number of the bed and the date. The price depends on two things: how many other people have heard that language speak, and what the sentence says. A sentence in Old Prussian, which has a large and devoted audience, is cheap; you can buy t...
From the lore of The Architecture of Babel.